database design question

From: danjourno <danjourno_at_hotmail.com>
Date: Sat, 28 Dec 2002 00:02:57 +1100
Message-ID: <3e0c4f89$0$25755$afc38c87@news.optusnet.com.au>

i am having a problem trying to figure out which way to go with adding multilingual support to my database.

I am trying to store labels for multiple languages in my DB so I am creating a table called labels
currently I have a table with three columns. One for an index, one for the actual label, and one that links to a language ID. all index values are in english

index | label | language_id

---

yes                yes                EN
yes                oui                FR

primary key(index, language_id)

I am thinking that I should actually change this to add more collumns rather that rows.
like below.

index | label_eng | label_fr | label_ch | label_etc.......

---

yes            yes                    oui                ????

.......

and then continue to add more columns as I add more languages.

---

my question is..: is this second option a better option? as far as database design goes, taking into account that the size of these label fields may come to over 150 chars..?

BTW I am currently using 3.23 but I understand that version 4 supports multiple charsets.
this is one of my reasons for thinking of this change

thanks heaps

dan Received on Fri Dec 27 2002 - 07:02:57 CST